About

The George Washington University Political Science Department houses nationally recognized undergraduate and graduate programs with emphases in American Politics, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.

Faculty and graduate student research is at the cutting edge, taking advantage of the department's location in Washington, D.C. to leverage data and resources unique to this national and world capital. Included in our faculty are Martha Finnemore, a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sarah Binder, a top congressional scholar, and Nathan Brown, who was selected by the Carnegie Corporation as one of the 24 scholars offering new and compelling issues. In recent years our graduate students have been placed in tenure-track faculty positions at schools such as the University of Oregon, University of Missouri, University of Toronto, and James Madison University, have taken jobs in organizations such as the Congressional Research Service and U.S. Department of State, and have received pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at Brown, Harvard, MIT, University of Michigan, Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford.

The department seeks to promote the creation, dissemination, and appropriate application of knowledge about political behavior and governance. We accomplish this goal by maintaining excellence in research and scholarship, training graduate students for productive careers in teaching, research, and public life, providing undergraduates with knowledge and analytical tools that will enable them to make informed and critical judgments about political and policy issues, and to communicate such judgments clearly and convincingly, and contributing service through expertise to the profession, university, and community.